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viewing a toilet from below
Sunday, July 31 2016
Today marks the 20th anniversary of my keeping of an online journal (one that people can read from anywhere in the world). I missed a few days here and there in the beginning, but I've got an entry now for every day since some time in October, 1996. If you include all of my offline paper journals, I've written specific entries on considerably more than half of the days that I have been alive. Every now and then I think about stopping, but for some reason I never do. The number of undocumented days in my adult life only comes to about four or five years during my twenties, so it's hard to imagine not doing it.
Later this evening Gretchen would be coming home with her friend Sarah the Poet from Washington DC, so it was my job to fix up the house. It was already in pretty good shape, but Gretchen really wanted to replace the old toilet seat in the basement master guestroom's bathroom. It was a padded toilet seat with a lenticular fish design on it, and over the years it had developed cracks in the part one sits on. And nobody wants to sit on a toilet seat that appears to be impossible to clean.
Normally replacing a toilet seat is easy, but for whatever reason, the little plastic nuts securing the seat to the toilet could not be turned no matter what technique I tried. I even lay on my back looking up at the nuts from below in hopes of hitting them with just the right blow to get them to turn, but not even that worked. As I later explained to Gretchen, even when a heroin addict hits rock bottom, it's unusual for him or her to find him or herself on his or her back looking up at a toilet.
Ultimately, I had to go get a drill and drill out the screws securing the seat from above. Unusually, they were made of aluminum (not plastic). This was an easier material to drill than steel (and I've had to do that a few times, particularly when disassembling old rusted exhaust systems), but it produced lots of menacingly-spiraled aluminum swarf, which I then had to vacuum up.
I took a semi-recreational 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse this afternoon and proceeded to work on a project for The Organization even though it was the weekend. Why? Because doing web work on Vyvanse is recreational!
Then, of course, I wanted to drink alcohol, so I painted a picture of a Black Bear from a photo I found in a Google Image search. Here are the results:
The original.
Double-mirrored Hagia-Sophia-style.
Later I was looking at the resume of an applicant for a junior web developer position being advertised by The Organization, and I began to wonder if perhaps he was a mole sent by one of the many corporations that do not like The Organization's work. It would be a relatively simple matter to infiltrate a non-profit from the inside by responding to an ad for a web developer, especially if the acceptable salary is sufficiently low. The thing about people hired to work in information technology is that they are often quickly given full access to all of an organization's technical secrets, which, given the way business works these days, amounts to all of their secrets. So this evening I did some Google searches using terms from the applicant's resume. Doing this, I found a resume he'd posted to a Spanish-language job site. This resume was accompanied by a photograph. So I then did a Google image search using that photograph, and was astounded to find that it was being used by an individual with a completely different name. There are, or course, benign explanations for this. The applicant's photo could have been usurped by someone and used to create a troll identity (I've done this many times). Or the applicant might've legitimately thought he'd have more luck with a photo but, having a poor self image, elected to use the photo of a friend. But even if that is true, this discovery does call into question the authenticity of this individual, and I was sure to alert the others in charge of doing the hiring.
When Gretchen returned home this evening with Sarah the Poet, I was still somewhat affected by the stimulants I'd taken earlier. I've noticed that as they wear off, they make my behavior excessively Aspergery (manifesting chiefly as social awkwardness), something Gretchen picked up on tonight.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160731 feedback
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